Quotes About Evolution

God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us.

The striking discoveries of contemporary science are continually telling us new things about how material creation came to be and how it continues to evolve. Although we do not have all the answers, we are clearly going in a direction that transcends the cosmology in which the great world religions came into existence. Our vision, understanding, and our attitudes about God inevitably must change.

Good companies embrace a culture of mini-failures.

For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behaviour is called...policy.

Science is unique among human ways of knowing because it is self-correcting. Every

Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?

To the regret of pessimists, our primitive ancestors could not see that theirs was not a time in which to produce children.

For the time being, it need only be said that the philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—parent of all horrors.

Paradoxically, this evolution toward life-sickness would be promoted by a mounting happiness among us. This happiness would be quickened by our following Mainländer's evangelical guidelines for achieving such things as universal justice and charity. Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, Mainländer figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.

He ceased to be a person so that he could remain a successful organism.

philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living—everyone of us.

Change equals growth.

No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

But it is also becoming evident that psychological evolution never optimized us for lasting happiness; on the contrary, it placed us on the hedonic treadmill. We are driven to seek pleasure and joy, to avoid pain and depression. The hedonic treadmill is the motor that nature invented to keep the organism running.

How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer's days!

Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine—that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law—cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.

It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way.

The evolutionary story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position. … Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.

Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside

If we continue to assume that we are parts of the physical world and that the evolutionary process that brought us into existence is part of its history, then something must be added to the physical conception of the natural order that allows us to explain how it can give rise to organisms that are more than physical. The resources of physical science are not adequate for this purpose, because those resources were developed to account for data of a completely different kind.